Week 70: 13th – 19th January
In thinking about the nature of museums, I have focused on the ways in which artists have critiqued the (art) museum format. However, as my initial project focused on anthropological concerns, I felt it necessary to re-examine the relationship of the museum to other cultural objects.
Shields and Objects
The Pitt Rivers Museum (mentioned in week 62) is of particular interest due to its historicised nature, that is, in the way that it is presented as a 19th Century ethnographic collection, rather than according to a contemporary schema of museum curation. As it also hosts a programme for inviting and commissioning artists, the museum presents a useful case study in how contemporary artists respond to museum collections, as well as the history of anthropology.
Previously, the museum has also worked with the University of Kent to provide a website of interpretive and contextual information about the museum’s collection of shields from Australia, Africa and Asia. In addition, the site also contains extensive bibliographies and essays about the history of anthropology, as detailed below.
The function of the museum
The museum as a didactic format for the study of natural and man-made objects has long been established. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, changes in museum policy and ethics created different ways of thinking about the museum format, particularly around collecting and displaying objects from field studies, as evidenced in the extract provided from Stocking’s ‘Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture’.
As the text states: “William Sturtevant found in 1969 that although the timing and duration of the peak of museum anthropology had come at different times in England, France, Germany, and the United States, the general trend after 1930 had been uniformly down, reaching a low point in the United States in the 1960s … (Sturtevant, 1969: 626). At the last point in history when it would be possible to collect and document ‘hand-made traditional artefacts’, few field ethnographers were still interested in collecting … In a context where ‘at least 90% of museum ethnological specimens (had probably) never been studied’ at all, the research function of museums had atrophied, and the professional status of curators drastically declined.”
Museums, Objects and Representation
The challenges of displaying ethnographic objects in a museum environment are also discussed in the essays ‘Behind the Scenes: Museums and Selective Criticism’ by Brian Durrans, Oral Tradition and Material Culture: Multiplying Meaning of ‘Words’ and ‘Things’ by Julie Cruikshank, and Museums, Tourism and the Devil at Burlington Gardens by Tristan Platt.
Durrans discusses the politics of representation and how museums can be seen as complicit in the oppression of the cultures that they aim to represent. His essay is centred around questions raised in the book ‘Exhibiting Cultures’, (eds. Karp and Lavine, 1991), which was based on a conference of the same name. These questions include the role that the author’s subjectivity plays in creating and disseminating anthropological knowledge and the ways in which museums and curators have tried to engage audiences within these processes, specifically in the privileging of exhibitions over the other work of the museum, such as research, documenting, collecting, and publishing.
Words as things
Cruikshank also discusses the difficulties of using objects to describe culture, particularly in the case of collecting oral traditions as artefacts, in the form of documents, tapes and video. This also intersects with new ways of thinking about ethnographic writing. She explains: “Native oral traditions have roots in procedure and methods different from written literary texts. Increasingly, indigenous writers are experimenting with literary forms, redefining ethnographic authority on their own terms and challenging images of their cultures presented by non-Western writers, film-makers and anthropologists”.
Finally, Platt discusses the ‘Bolivian Worlds’ exhibition, and its glaring omissions in relation to the effects of Western market Capitalism on the region. He also suggests other potential interpretive strategies: “An exhibition plunged in near-darkness, carefully lit, and with adjoining ‘windows’ on specific topics… Visitors could even have been offered miners’ helmets and lamps on entry…”. This last observation in particular, resonates with the ways in which I have previously grouped objects in curatorial practice, which has made me consider whether I have been thinking of artwork as interpretation all along.
